Housekeeping: Cleaning Out Post Drafts

You see them every day you open your WordPress blog’s Administration Panels. They stare at you. They are right there near the top, lurking. Haunting. You try to ignore them but they sit there, like eyes watching in the night. They are the things you have left undone, unfinished, incomplete, or in debate. They are your post drafts! EEEEEEEK!

Yes, your drafts are the posts you started, but for whatever reason you did not publish. Some of you may have none. Some may have hundreds. Me, I had ENOUGH. They were starting to haunt my nightmares.

I spent part of this weekend going through the many drafts I’d accumulated and it got me thinking about why I have this great list of draft posts, on more than one blog, too, and why I’m procrastinating over them.

Some of them just need more research, resources, and writing. This is part of the process of developing an article. I get to the point where I need more information but it will take more time to find than I have at that moment. So I save the post as a draft.

Sometimes, I spot something interesting that I want to blog about, but again, I haven’t thought it all out and I’m not sure what I want to say, but I want to say something, so into the draft pile it goes.

Other times, someone has recommended something, a web page, a quote, an article, some point I want to remember and research more, so I use the WordPress post draft feature to save the information as a note to myself. Yes, there are notepad and note taking WordPress Plugins I could use, but these are not available on WordPress.com, and some of my huge pile of posts on my main site have been sitting there for over a year, since before these Plugins came out. Okay, so I procrastinate sometimes.

And sometimes life just gets in the way and I don’t want to leave the post I’m writing open so I save it as a draft and dash away from my desk to meet with clients or friends, get groceries, run errands, pull the cat off the window screen, or whatever it is that life dishes out to get in the way of my blog writing.

The list of drafts piles up, one upon the other. They don’t go away, and I have to DO something with them in order to get rid of them.

As I go through them, some I realize are just a waste of time, or I’ve already written something better on the subject, forgetting I’d started the topic before. Others are good, but they are old news.

Then there are those gems that I stumble upon and think “Wow. I wrote this.” Then I wonder why I didn’t publish it. I concentrate and pour over the words, then find the flaw in the gem. This must have been one of those brilliant starts that either went no where, or life interfered. Still, I can easily clean these up and get them out of the Draft box.

I find one that needs confirmation and verification. The news is interesting, but I couldn’t find any substantiation to prove the story, so it sat and waited, and I forgot. I hit the search enginesn, and lo and behold, there is nothing. I can’t validate the story. I can’t even find the original post from where the story came from six months ago. It’s a page not found error. Well, that kills the story. So much for procrastination. Sometimes it’s a good thing. Keeps me from making a fool of myself.

My husband walks by and glances at the screen as I’m working on another post. He says, “Oh, did you hear that so and so said this and that about the subject?” He goes on to give me tons of new information and insights, and once again the two of us, a fabulous writing team, are at it again. We’ve been writing together for over 12 years and it’s magical. We haven’t done much together recently as his new work contracts are back on massive overtime, so for a few minutes, it’s a joy to be writing with my best friend. See, procrastination can also bring good things.

I get the list down to a few that just need more time than I can give them right now, but at least I’ve cleaned out my Draft box. It’s a good feeling. Maybe now I can sleep a little better.

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[…] at the top of my Write Post and Manage Posts panel that remind me of unfinished work. I’ve written reminders to you to clean out your post draft list once in a while, but I’m still as guilty of this procrastination as […]